Why is this statement worth highlighting? Is it because the OECD is wasting our money persecuting jurisdictions with no income taxes? That’s one of the many bad activities of the OECD, but it’s not what makes Monsieur Saint-Amans’ statement such a stunning display of tone-deaf hypocrisy.

The reason his comments are so absurd is that bureaucrats at the OECD are exempt from paying tax!

Emoluments (basic salary and allowances) are payable in arrears, with the exception of the installation allowance which is payable on taking up duty. Emoluments are exempt from taxation in most Member countries of the Organisation, including France.

Yes, you read correctly. OECD bureaucrats “are exempt from taxation.”

And when the OECD says “most Member countries,” that pretty much means every nation in the world other than the United States. But even that’s not really true since Americans who work at the OECD get extra salary to cover their tax bill to the IRS, so they wind up with just as much in their bank accounts as the workers from other nations who officially get tax-free salaries.

Keep in mind, by the way, that the bureaucrats also get a plethora of fringe benefits. But we’re not just talking about their gold-plated health benefits and generous pensions. OECD bureaucrats get a bevy of special allowances.

Ordinary people like you and me are expected to pay for our kids and our housing out of our paychecks. And that’s after government takes a big bite. And one of the reasons our taxes are so high is so that we can pay big salaries to tax-exempt OECD bureaucrats…and to also give them extra money for kids and housing.

Life must be nice if you’re a member of the gilded class.

Given Monsieur Saint-Amans privileged tax status, you would think that this pampered member of the bureaucratic elite would be somewhat cautious about criticizing a “golden era” when people “don’t pay taxes anywhere.”

But apparently it doesn’t bother him to demonstrate a spectacular level of hypocrisy. Indeed, I suspect that he has set the all-time record for hypocrisy in government.

What do you think? Has this OECD bureaucrat engaged in a more egregious form of hypocrisy than these other examples?

Maybe my views are affected by my disdain for the OECD, as well as my hostility for taxes, but I certainly think Monsieur Saint-Amans wins the prize.

However, maybe this isn’t a fair competition. After all, he was a tax collector for the French government before joining the OECD, so that gives him an almost super-human level of expertise in promoting bad policy. I’m sure he’s quite proud that there are thousands of people in his country that are forced to pay more than 100 percent of their income to the government.

That being said, I’m sure he’s quite happy that he pays nothing.

P.S. Years ago, the predecessor to Monsieur Saint-Amans testified to the Finance Committee in Washington. I arranged for one of the Senators to ask Jeffrey Owens whether he thought it was hypocritical to advocate higher taxes for everyone else while simultaneously being exempt from income tax. Mr. Owens truculently replied that he could make more money if he worked in the private sector (which didn’t answer the question, but he obviously wanted people to think he was making a big sacrifice by working at a tax-free position).

Even though it was irrelevant, I’m sure what he said was true. But what’s important to understand is that he had “value” to the private sector only because of his insider connections with tax authorities in member nations. In other words, he had high value in a world of big government and crony capitalism. So you won’t be surprised to learn that Mr. Owens went to one of the Big 4 accounting firms after retiring from the OECD.

5 Responses

Mr. Mitchell is right. The ultimate backstop against the slower growth humanity, inherent in coercive collectivism, is international competition. Both Mr. Mitchell and the OECD understand that. In my opinion, it is the very fact that Mr Mitchell understands the gravity of this most important of freedom fights that makes this blog so distinctly valuable.

In the short and medium term, the OECD and a gullible worldwide voter-lemming majority may ultimately succeed in recruiting most nations into a global high tax coercive collectivism cartel — and then intimidate the remaining countries into submission. It will be very detrimental indeed, and will delay humanity’s growth integral into the future. Hundreds of millions of people, perhaps even billions, will die from otherwise curable causes (as, for example, cancer will be in the future) because prosperity and longevity growth will be pushed into the future by demotivating coercive collectivism, as the best of humanity’s greedy brains decrease their participation in innovation and take up more golf, fishing, fashionable living etc. or are regulated away from “out of the box” solutions which voter-lemmings don’t foresee as part of the “great collective plan forward” (great innovations, developments and affordable productizations are always made by a few individuals, not the majority consensus, which, almost by definition embodies mediocrity). That is the essence of what slow growth is about and the human tragedy of most voter-lemmings not understanding exponents ie. compounding.

But voter-lemmings are always oblivious to growth that did not happen. Just remember that if humanity’s annual growth had been a mere two tenths of a percentage point higher in the last millennium, today you (yes, I mean YOU the voter-lemming) would be seven times wealthier (*) and you would most likely be living in the post cancer cure era, surrounded by unimaginable and fantastical things that today you cannot buy at any price. That is the fantastic effect if growth and the indescribable misery of growth forgone.

But OECD totalitarianism will not work in the longer term. It will only push humanity into a short-mid term detrimental distortion. Human evolution cannot be stopped, though communal dreams of coercive collectivism can slow it down and make it painful. Eventually, the benefit of breaking loose from the OECD’s global oppressive grip will outweigh the retribution risks, and some nations will break free. When that happens, we will have seen the true light at the end of the tunnel. For the time being, we are joining Europe into the tunnel of HopNChange. The pendulum has not started swinging into the opposite direction. The dream that “sooner or later individuals ( especially the exceptional ones) will be either convinced or coerced into leaving their homes and families every morning to go and enthusiastically work for distant others”, keeps gaining ground in the developed world. The voter-lemmings of the developed world have now chosen a path of growth deficit compared to the world average. Therefore, the standard of living of developed world voter-lemmings is being de-facto absorbed into the world average. Seems like the developed world will enter the tunnel of coercive collectivism and below average growth before they eventually exit it. But don’t despair. This is the twenty first century and humanity is moving ever faster. We may enter the tunnel and exit it in just a few decades. Ascents and declines that used to take centuries will now conclude in decades. Teach yourself, and especially your children, to be internationally mobile and you will fare well.

In “the good old days” we of the private sector did not take issue with the benefits packages of government workers, nor their pay, nor their pensions. After all, they worked in thankless. dead-end. low paying jobs that were only there for those who could not make it in the private sector. Heck- we didn’t even complain when we went to the department of motor vehicles and watched while seven people behind the counter labored to serve one person on our side of the counter.

Then somewhere in the 1990’s the landscape changed While they were still on track for continuous cost-of-living salary increases, the private economy tanked. It has now been identified that the average American’s income is comparably lower today than it was in 1989. Meanwhile the government employee has enjoyed a continuous increase- both in salary and (thanks to unions) their benefits package.

I suspect that had the economy kept up and the private sector salaries increased at the same or higher rates as was the pattern in previous generations, there would be little complaint. Or at least less.

To battle this, the government worker has dug deep to find more regulatory burdens and more taxes to protect their hard-fought prosperity. I suspect, that as with other overtaxed societies, this will eventually come unraveled. We simply need a press corps (or is that corpse?) who is capable of pointing out these facts to the average low-information American voter.

[…] don’t know why he made the shift, but perhaps he likes the fact that OECD bureaucrats get tax-free salaries, which nicely insulates him from having to deal with the negative consequences of the policies he […]